A hard look at corn economics — and world hunger

Corn arriving at Lincolnway Energy, an ethanol plant in Iowa. According to the director of the Iowa Renewable Fuels Association, more than 60 percent of Iowa corn goes to ethanol plants. - Dan Weissmann/Marketplace

The corn harvest is coming in, and great weather has produced a record crop. This is terrible news for farmers: Oversupply means cratering prices.

If that sounds like a paradox, consider this: Corn, the biggest crop in our agricultural powerhouse of a nation, is not a foodstuff. It’s a highly refined industrial material—more like aluminum than apples. And a hard look at corn economics puts world hunger in a different light.

Let's start at an ethanol plant: Lincolnway Energy, in Nevada, Iowa. CEO and President Erik Hakmiller is our guide.

The plant includes several big buildings, lots of loud noises... and some unexpected smells. One is hard to place at first. "What you smell is residual carbon dioxide, and a cooking— very much like a bakery smell," says Hakmiller.

Then Hakmiller opens the door to a giant building with a corrugated metal roof.

It’s a barn. Inside are these golden mountains—piled-up flakes of grain.

For every bushel of corn that comes to Lincolnway Energy, only a third comes out as ethanol. Another third comes out as carbon dioxide, which goes into soda pop.

The rest—the fat, fiber and protein—ends up on one of these piles. "Each pile being about a thousand tons," says Hakmiller.

That’s one day’s worth of this stuff, called distillers grains.

"It’s good food for cows, chickens and pigs," Hakmiller says. Just as important, it’s cheap.

"For animal feeding, you feed the lowest cost to get the most growth out of the animal," he says. "So, everything has to price itself into the ration. Because a cow doesn’t say, ‘I’m eating Italian tonight.’ He’s got to eat whatever he gets fed."

If he’s in a feedlot—where most cows gain half their body weight—he’s probably eating corn, either distillers grains or the whole kernel.

And we are not. We wouldn’t recognize it.

Chris Edgington has been growing corn for decades. Here’s what his corn isn’t: "It is not the corn you eat off the cob," he says. "It is not what’s in the can. It is not what’s in the freezer, in the bag. It is not that product."

That product, sweet corn, is a different crop. And a lot smaller. Last year, for every pound of sweet corn, U.S. farmers grew more than 260 pounds of field corn.

Other than as a low-cost ration for animals, the big use for corn is ethanol.

Ethanol has been booming since 2000; there’s eight times as much now.

That’s been great for corn farmers because they have so much corn to get rid of.

"The joke in farm country has always been, if you give a farmer a market, he’ll overproduce it," says Monte Shaw, executive director of the Iowa Renewable Fuels Association, the state’s ethanol lobby. "And quite frankly, for over 200 years, that’s been pretty true, except for these last eight years, when ethanol sucked up all that extra corn production."

Extra production is not one year’s bumper crop, and it is not just the extra acres that got planted after the ethanol boom.